Serum cholesterol, other risk factors, and cardiovascular disease in a Japanese cohort

The relationship of serum cholesterol and other risk factors to cardiovascular disease was investigated in a 16-year cohort of 16,711 residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Examined in detail were the relationship of serum cholesterol, and the joint relationships of serum cholesterol, systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure, and other risk factors to coronary heart disease (CHD), cerebral infarction (CI), and cerebral hemorrhage (CH). Baseline and biennially collected risk factor data were analyzed. The latter type of measurement permitted separate investigation of both the short-term and long-term effects of cholesterol measurements. In both types of analyses, both serum cholesterol and blood pressure showed strong associations with CHD incidence. In particular, there were strong associations with short-term and delayed CHD incidence. Furthermore, the association of cholesterol with short-term CHD incidence could not be explained by its association with delayed CHD incidence, or vice versa. Multivariate analyses that also included several other risk factors (smoking habits, clinical diagnosis of diabetes mellitus, left ventricular hypertrophy or strain on electrocardiogram, relative body weight, hematocrit, and proteinuria) for which data were available showed such risk factors to be of lesser, but generally non-negligible, importance in this population. In the case of CH and CI, serum cholesterol was found to be weakly or not at all related to incidence of either disease while blood pressure remained a strong correlate. For CI some suggestion of a statistical interaction between blood pressure and serum cholesterol was found. Discussed are implications for theories of disease pathogenesis for CHD, CI and CH.